NOT unusually, some people have latched on to a reported statement from Mr Colin Bullock of the Planning Institute of Jamaica that our economy is back in recession because the country experienced two consecutive quarters of no growth in the last calendar year.

The glee with which they have ‘run wid it’ could lead one to conclude that a recession is something to be happy about. On the contrary, a lack of growth is a really bad sign in an economy which so badly needs to grow.

We of course suspect that the political silly season is now on and we should probably expect that every economic development is either going to be all good or all bad, depending on which side of the fence it is being viewed from.

For those of us who have no vested interest in painting an all-too-rosy or all-too-muddy picture of our economy, we point to a blurb in the article, “How to think about growth in Jamaica”, written by the very scholarly Mr Keith Collister and published in yesterday’s edition of the Business Observer:

“Two quarters of economic decline is actually not the technical definition of recession even in the US (this is merely a Wall Street shorthand), as there is actually a US committee that dates recessions on a number of technical indicators including employment,” Mr Collister writes. “Somewhat unhelpfully, this is normally after the recession has typically ended. The same would be true, using slightly different parameters (absent the committee), in Jamaica.”

We are also mindful that the Governor of the Bank of Jamaica Mr Brian Wynter had predicted last year August that growth in the September quarter may be slower due to the impact of drought on agricultural production, but adding that he expected growth to rise to the two to three per cent range in the medium term.

At that time, Mr Wynter was accused of putting too positive a spin on the state of the economy, when the central bank governor told journalists that the Jamaican economy was showing unprecedented resilience to inflationary shocks. The governor then attributed this resilience to the transformation of the economy taking place under Jamaica’s four-year Extended Fund Facility programme with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The carping for growth in the economy has tended to suggest that there is no growth at all or that there is some magical way to achieve growth. Interestingly, those who are thundering about a lack of growth never seem to have any suggestions as to how to achieve this. They also need to tell us whether Jamaica needs to continue with or dispense with the IMF programme which has stabilised the economy.

Jamaicans have suffered too painful an austerity to listen to those who wish to continue playing the old game of throwing the baby out with the bath water.